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Google is Making it Easier to Share Publisher's Links Via AMP

Google has made changes to the way that its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) are viewed and shared following publishers’, false, beliefs that Google was stealing their traffic – due AMP URLs being displayed as Google’s rather than the publisher’s.

The AMP project was created by Google to speed up web browsing on mobile devices. However, to achieve this, it means a rather confusing setup featuring three different kinds of URL. These URLs being: the original publisher’s URL, a Google AMP Cache URL and a Google AMP Viewer URL – which is displayed as a Google page to the user. As a result of this setup, many publishers feared that their pages were not being shared because people were unsure of sharing Google pages.

To combat this, Google has introduced a way for the publisher’s URL to be shared. The update sees an anchor button placed on the AMP Viewer header, from which the user will be presented with the original link. The user can then long-tap on this link to use their browser’s native share functionality.

“We as Google have every intention in making the AMP experience as good as we can for both, users and publishers,” said Alex Fischer, software engineer at Google search, in a blog post. “A thriving ecosystem is very important to us and attribution, user trust, and ownership are important pieces of this ecosystem.”

The updated function is already available on Google’s iOS app and will make its way to on to Android in the coming weeks.